Breaking Sounds

Tunnel of Love are Unreal

Tunnel of Love of Brookline, Massachusetts is a band that has it all. First, their uniforms: striped tights and athletic shorts, -no shirts. Perfect! It's just weird enough. Who else is doing the uniform thing, save for maybe some band mates with the same pair of Chuck Taylors? The Mummies is the only band I can think of, and that shit is way over. Second, their drummer Makoto Sato, is a fucking animal. The dude drums standing up, as if he’s too feral to understand what sitting down even is. He beats on the drums with sloppy and savage inaccuracy like some kind of angry ape in an old Samsonite luggage commercial. Brothers, Andy and Anthony MacBain both switch off playing a guitar held together with duct tape, and screaming murder into a mic. They look similar to one another, both dirty looking with bad hair. Almost like the dirtbags down the block who would beat you up as a kid. And lastly, their songs are so raw and stripped down to the marrow, that they are absolutely void of anything but pure soul-scraping aggression. One-chord slop, so mean it knocks your IQ down a couple points, where it belongs. I caught them for the first time this past May. They set up, not on the stage, but along a wall about twenty feet from the front of the stage. They stacked their amps up, one on top of another and then strung Christmas lights all over them. It was as if they were cavemen decorating their den with dung paintings. People started gathering around them, some looked puzzled, and others looked on like they were about to witness a freak show or a car accident. As they bust into their first song, Andy, began to prance/pace in an aggravated, screaming impetuous storm of debauchery while the brother, Anthony, adorned with a cape beat his guitar. As the chorus came around I realized that they were playing The Stones’ “Paint it Black.” They had tore it down to a core level where shit and shine exist together in a harmonious heap of stomach bile. It was the best cover I’ve ever heard.